17612: On Celebrating Inclusive Beauty.

  

From The Drum…

What Notting Hill carnival teaches us about beauty’s inclusivity problem

By Manish Tiwari, Chairman & Founder Here&Now365

Notting Hill Carnival is a masterclass in what inclusive beauty really looks like. Here&Now 365’s Preet Khanna argues that brands need to go beyond diverse casting and prove their credentials through product, presence and genuine participation in culture.

Every August, Notting Hill Carnival showcases the same beauty truth: the haircare industry still hasn’t caught up with the people it serves. Locs, coils, braids, twists and afros filled the streets, worn loud, proud and completely unfiltered. But most of the products lining supermarket shelves were designed with none of that texture in mind.

So, what better test of a haircare brand than Notting Hill Carnival, where hours of dancing, heat and humidity leave a product that doesn’t perform with nowhere to hide?

At Vatika Naturals, over 140 years have gone into building a brand around one belief: no hair type should be left behind by generic haircare standards. This year, that belief met its truest test at Notting Hill Carnival. The result was #CarnivalOfStrands, a campaign built not simply as a marketing exercise, but as a genuine attempt to meet the community where it already was.

As Roshni Singh, head of marketing at Vatika Naturals, put it: “Our ethos has always been to embrace your natural self, and that belief sits at the heart of everything we create for our multi-ethnic audiences. #CarnivalOfStrands was a genuine attempt to cater to every hair type and celebrate the unique rhythm of every strand, part of a wider journey to build a brand that speaks to the full diversity of hair textures across our communities.”

What did this year’s Carnival tell us about building an inclusive beauty brand?

The gap is about presence, not awareness

Most ‘inclusive’ haircare campaigns stop at representation in imagery: a wider range of models, a more diverse casting brief. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. What became clear early on was that the real gap was physical. Brands simply weren't showing up in the spaces where textured hair is most visibly, joyfully on display. So instead of running the campaign purely through digital media, Vatika went to where the hair was, taking over key spaces at Paddington Station to greet Carnival-goers the moment they stepped off the train.

That decision reshaped how the campaign was thought about as a whole. A poster can say a brand is inclusive but simply meeting someone where they are already celebrating says it more convincingly than any headline could.

Culture-first doesn’t mean culture-adjacent

There’s a difference between borrowing a moment and actually contributing to it. Partnering with Sundivas, a London-based music duo, let Vatika carry its brand ethos, ‘own your story, let them know’, through sound rather than just signage. It’s a small distinction, but an important one: Carnival’s invitation to show up exactly as you are works best when a brand adds something to that spirit rather than simply attaching itself to it.

Product credibility still must do the work

None of this lands without the product actually performing. Vatika’s Aquaboost and Curls Oil ranges exist because curl patterns behave differently under heat, humidity and hours of movement, the exact conditions Carnival puts hair through. But the bigger lesson for the industry isn’t about any single formula. It’s that inclusivity claims collapse quickly if the product itself was never built with textured hair as the standard, rather than an addition to an existing range. Carnival is where that promise was put to the test and proven right.

It’s more than just one campaign message

The haircare industry’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach has rarely reflected what Carnival looks like on the streets, and that mismatch isn’t unique to one event. It shows up every time a brand treats textured hair as a niche rather than a norm.

What #CarnivalOfStrands reinforced is that closing that gap takes more than a campaign message; it takes formulation built for the full range of textures, and a willingness to show up physically in the communities a brand says it's serving.

Vatika doesn’t claim to have solved that. But the brand came away from this Carnival with a sharper sense of what “inclusive” has to mean in practice: not a wider casting call, but a wider standard, for what counts as normal hair, and for where a brand is willing to turn up and prove it.